Fluency Matters with Jen Yagid and Wendy Darasz
Wendy Darasz and Jen Yagid are both Wilson certified and credentialed Dyslexia Practitioners. They have worked together for over 10 years. They are self-described Science of Reading geeks and are passionate about evidenced-based literacy instruction.
Wendy and Jen co-founded Informed Literacy in 2015 to help build a community of like-minded individuals and to spread the word about structured literacy practices. As reading specialists, they work with a diverse population of students, including regular and special education students and English language learners from kindergarten to grade 6.
Their mission at Informed Literacy is to support teachers and parents of emergent and struggling readers because …every child deserves reading success.
What is the best definition of fluency?
What is automaticity and accuracy, prosody, speed, punctuation, expression
Why is fluency important for readers?
What are the most important components of fluency?
How do we assess fluency?
Episode Transcript
Hanna:
Welcome everyone to another episode of the My Literacy Space Podcast. Today we're talking all about fluency with my friends, Jen and Wendy, from Informed Lit, that you can find them both on Instagram. Welcome, friends.
Jen Yagid:
Hi, Hanna. Thank you for having us.
Wendy:
Hey, Hanna. Thank you for having us.
Hanna:
I'm really excited because I think this is a piece of information that maybe is overlooked, or maybe it's a little bit misunderstood, or we just have some general misunderstandings, or we don't have a deep understanding of what fluency actually is. So I'm excited to talk about that today, but why don't we start with Jen, introduce yourself, and then we'll move on to Wendy.
Jen Yagid:
Okay. Sounds good. Hi everyone. I'm Jen Yagid. Wendy and I are both certified reading specialists and Wilson Dyslexia Practitioners. My story began as a third grade teacher. I ended up moving from third grade to a first grade classroom and really found that I enjoyed working with emergent readers. This led me to get my reading degree where I accepted a position as a reading specialist. So as a new reading specialist, I knew there was a need for assessment to diagnose areas of weakness, but I didn't have those skills yet that would allow me to know what to do with these struggling readers. I was super fortunate to have met Wendy when we became colleagues and shared our reading room in 2012 and in that experience, just coming from a balanced literacy background and working with those struggling readers, it became readily apparent that the balanced literacy practices just were not helping our students.
Hanna:
Yeah. All right, Wendy.
Wendy:
Hi, I'm Wendy. So prior to meeting Jen, I spent many years in a first grade classroom. I started out, believe it or not, with whole language, then it evolved into balance literacy and I was really fortunate to work with a team of educators who were very reflective. We were looking at the data for our students are were like, "Our balance literacy is just not cutting it." So we decided to research some alternative approaches to teaching reading, and we fell in love with structured literacy. We did some work with Margie Gillis from Literacy How and it's just really great growth experience. After doing that, Jen got really inspired with teaching students how to read and how to read well and how to teach well.
So I got my advanced degree in reading and I got my position with Jen. Same thing, reading specialist in a case six environment and meeting Jen took my teaching and learning to a whole new level, which was really amazing. I just want to give a shout out to introspective supportive colleagues because it can really be life changing. Jen and I kept asking ourselves, "What can we do better? What can we learn more about?" We knew all about the systematic, sequential, cumulative instruction. We knew that was the way to go. So individually, apart from our district, we began researching and sought out workshops and presentations that were branded in the science of reading. Along the way, many of our colleagues were coming into our classroom asking us questions about it. So that's where we got inspired to found Informed Literacy in 2015 and then we started a blog in 2016.
Hanna:
That's really cool and here's some words that I want to pull out from what both of you just said. So we're hearing this word shift or evolution, this growth, being introspective, being reflective in our practices. I think that's the biggest part that maybe feels scary. It might feel a little bit daunting when we think, this is what we've learned, this is what we've been doing, and now there's this whole body of evidence that has come forward in the science of reading, and how do we catch up when we're in the midst of still working in one approach that we've been used to, right? You can't just shift every single piece overnight. So I want to first ask a question before we jump into fluency, because I really want to validate where people are on their SOR journey because we're all in a different spot. Was there one specific moment where you made the shift or you realized something had to be different so that you could provide that information to your students?
Jen Yagid:
So for me, as I had mentioned earlier, I was really good at the assessment part. I could do the assessments. I could come up with some fancy documents that shared the results, but then I really didn't know what to do with them. When Wendy and I were developing our blog, one of the core beliefs of our blog is assess, analyze, instruct and that helps me. It just serves me in my teaching all the time. I want to assess where the students are. I want to analyze where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Then I want to instruct explicitly into those areas of weakness and also picking up on their strength.
Hanna:
Awesome. What about you, Wendy?
Wendy:
As I mentioned before, I was working with a great group of first grade teachers and we were looking at our data just like Jen. So we were assessing, and we were noticing that there were some kids who could read no matter what and they always scored really well, but there was always this group of children who just weren't making the progress that we needed. One of my colleagues had gone to a workshop and she came back with this information about syllable types, and teaching into the pattern, and teaching systematically, teaching phonic systematically. We're like, "That just makes so much sense." So, funny story, sitting at dinner with my son and my husband, and my son was at the time in high school, and I was talking about syllable patterns, and he's like, "What? There's patterns to words?" He was a great reader, but he just naturally learned to read. So that was my big aha moment. Kids don't naturally know that there's patterns to words and we have to tell them.
Hanna:
Okay. I love that because I want people to feel heard in their own journey and that we weren't all taught this as educators and went flying right off. We've all made shifts and that evolution in our instruction is key. The reflection piece, like we've all just said in a different way, that self reflection of something isn't quite what I think it could be, so let's look at my practices, let's look at can I get more information? So that's really what I want this podcast to be and it's also what I want our summer summit to be.
So if the first podcast that you've listened to for My Literacy Space Podcast, this summer we're doing Signs of Reading Summer Summit, and Jen and Wendy are both presenters and they're going to be talking about fluency. I want to give a little sneak peek today because I want people to understand that is one of what the National Reading Panel calls the big five. Fluency is really critical and we have evidence to show what it means and then how to go about providing that instruction. So why don't we just start with what's the best definition of fluency?
Jen Yagid:
Okay. So I'll take this one. So as new educators, I would've defined fluency as reading at an appropriate rate with some expression. So if my kids were reading at a good rate with expression, I felt good about that. We feel that it's just so important to stress the idea to both teachers and students that it's not just about reading fast. So we outline, and we will outline in more detail during the summit, three key components of literacy. So the first one is accuracy. So accuracy obviously is reading words correctly and it's really a measure of one's coding ability. It's calculated as a percentage. So on the leveled reader, you'd see 95% accurate for something or on a running record, you'd see 95% accuracy. So it's calculated as a percentage.
Then we would go into automaticity. This one is the one that I probably was least aware of. So it pertains to rate, but it means more than that. It's calculated as correct words per minute and I don't know if you've seen... So Wendy and I always jump on our soapbox about words per minute versus correct words per minute. So with the automaticity, so the automaticity, they need to be at a good rate, but you need to be calculating correct words per minute. So correct words per minute, if a student reads a passage, you would see how many words they read, but in order to get their correct words per minute, need to then subtract the errors and a lot of level assessments and running records, people don't do that. It's a huge difference.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Jen Yagid:
So if a student has read a hundred words per minute, but then made 25 errors, they really only made read 75 correct words per minute. So that's one of the big ahas with fluency for me, that it is rate, but you have to take into account the accuracy.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Jen Yagid:
So the final component is prosody and that's the ability to read with expression and proper phrasing. It sounds fancy, but really that's all it is and really it's just the student's ability to attend to punctuation, which is also important.
Hanna:
So when I'm thinking of prosody too, I think one of the ways that, yes, we have the automaticity and the accuracy, and then we want to be an interesting reader. We want somebody to understand because it really is that bridge to comprehension. When we have the decoding, that word recognition, Timothy Rasinski says, "Fluency then is the bridge that helps us get to a reading comprehension." So one of the things, if we're working on prosody specifically is I love reading Janell Cannon's books. She has a lot of dialogue tags and so she's an author.
One of my favorite books to practice this with is Crickwing. It's about this little cockroach who breaks its wing and is not loved by all the critters in the forest, in the rainforest, because he's nasty and grumpy because his wing is broken. The way that she has all of these characters really developed and uses dialogue tags that are interesting, not just said, but grumbled, muttered, things like that can really help in the fluency piece because you have to be aware.
You can't just be decoding it and then move on. It helps to know how was he feeling when he said, he grumbled it, or the queen spat out her orders. Things like that make it alive and come alive to us, but that's one of the pieces, right? That's only one of the pieces that we're talking about, the automaticity, accuracy and prosody. So then why is fluency as a whole so important for readers?
Wendy:
So the segue that you just gave me is perfect, right? So fluency is the bridge to comprehension. So if students are only reading word by word, they're focused on the word level of their reading and likely only have surface level of comprehension. It's literal comprehension that they're picking up out of the passage, but when students can read accurately and with prosody, that's an indication that they're beginning to pick up on the author's underlying message. So for instance, like you were talking about muttered or grumbled, if a student is reading about a character that's walking into a haunted house, if they're really inferring what the author is talking about, they're going to slow their voice.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Wendy:
Because they want to convey that tension and that's when you know that the student is picking up more than just the surface level of comprehension. So one of the things that we like to keep in mind, Jen, and I like to keep in mind is cognitive energy. If you're thinking about cognitive energy, which is how much brain space you have, that's how I like to term it, but it's a pie, a whole pie. If a student is focused on decoding and they're not automatic with their decoding, and they're using 75% of that pie on decoding, they only have 25% left for comprehension.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Wendy:
That's why automaticity, prosody, accuracy is so important. That's why fluency is important because when you're fluent, now you can attend to the comprehension piece.
Hanna:
Okay. So I love of the pie analogy, mostly because I also love pie.
Wendy:
[inaudible 00:12:40]
Hanna:
Also just think about for kids, that's such a good visual, right? We have that cross curricular connection to a fraction. So if I'm using this much energy, this much brain power for this part, I only have this part left. That's part of the explicit construction, I think, for our kids too, for them to understand the why this is so important, right? We can't just say, "Here's our cute little poster about fluency and you need to be automatic and accurate and use prosody in your reading, but this is why."
Giving those examples of the pie or the bridge that Timothy Rasinski has in his book. I think that those pieces support the why for kids and they buy in. They can start that metacognitive like, "I know I need to show this and this is how I show it." It makes those pieces a little bit, maybe, more tangible or more easier to grasp for them. It doesn't seem like such a strange thing that they have to do. There is these systematic pieces that they have to get.
I always talk to my students about being a word detective. So yeah, we have to be the little, teeny, tiny pieces of the word, the phonemes and morphemes that we're looking at, but then those pieces have to be so easy that then we can read them with enjoyment and the reader can understand it and their comprehension grows. Let's talk about then what are the most important components then of fluency and maybe how we could assess them or integrate them in a little tiny mini lesson. I know we're going to go into lots of detail in the summit, but maybe a little sneak peek.
Jen Yagid:
We really like to assess our students at the beginning of the year and we use the DIBELS assessment. I'm not sure if you're familiar with DIBELS.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Jen Yagid:
So we use the DIBELS eighth assessment to assess our students and this is a free. It has a beginning of the year, middle of the year, end of the year benchmark, as well as a set of progress monitoring passages that you can use throughout the school year, which is awesome. They have beginning, middle, and end of year goals for your students, which are really helpful in identifying those readers who are at risk or possibly moderate risk for reading difficulties. The cool thing about DIBELS is that the benchmark scores, the DIBELS eighth benchmark scores, you can use those different subtests to create a composite score. When you create that composite score, it actually will flag students who could potentially be at risk for dyslexia or reading difficulty. That said, this is just an informal screen. It's not an evaluation for dyslexia, but it does put the kids on that spectrum and it highlights them so if further investigation is warranted, then you can look into that.
So basically the DIBELS has, we pulled out a grade two benchmark. So for the benchmark, there's a nonsense word fluency for sounds. There's nonsense word fluency correct words per minute, correct words. There is a real word reading fluency, the oral reading fluency, and then you're also taking into account the student's accuracy on the oral reading fluency passage, as well as a maze score, which a maze is just like when they have the sentences written down and there's spaces. Then the kids pick, there's three choices. The kids pick the best choice and that's a three minute measure that we would use as well. All of those subtests combined, you can create that composite score, which we find is really helpful.
So it's important to note that with the DIBELS, and we've had conversations on Instagram about this with people, that it is not a controlled text and non-controlled text, while it is the ultimate goal, it is the ultimate goal that we want for our readers, decodeable text is not forever. We say that all the time. That is really challenging for our early readers and our struggling readers to read this controlled passage. However, it does quantify where they're at. So even though it can be a struggle for the students, it's only a one minute read, but it can be a struggle in the beginning, but it gives you a starting point. So that's that assessment, going back to assess, analyze, instruct. It gives you that assessment point. We also really love to use the decodable text as another way to assess fluency. That was kind of a game changer. I feel like that just recently happened. Wendy and I talked about it over the last few years. I don't know. Do you use decodable text for...
Wendy:
Yeah.
Jen Yagid:
It gives a different perspective. It's super important and just having them read the decodable text, it provides information as to whether the students are actually responding to the explicit phonics instruction. So that's a newish thing for us.
Hanna:
Yeah and I think when you're thinking back to your approach, even when you're sharing on your blog post, that fits in so beautifully because you want to also assess if what you are teaching them, what instruction you provided, do they have it? So if you've only got something that you haven't taught certain words or certain patterns yet to use something as it DIBELS in the middle of that, we're not sure if they've got what we've just taught them. We know what they don't know, but I want to make sure I know what they do know based on the scope and sequence that I've been using. So I love that you said that as well. Wendy, you were going to jump in there.
Wendy:
Yeah, I was going to say there are a couple of things that Jen and I both love about the DIBELS. One of them is, again, it's comparing students against their grade level, right? So you have a measure of if they're at, below, or above grade level because parents want to know that, your administrators want to know that.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Wendy:
The other thing that we like about the DIBELS is that it's not a time-consuming assessment. It's one minute. It doesn't take a lot of time out of the teacher's day, but it gives you a lot of information.
Hanna:
I love that. So what can we look forward to hearing from you during our Science of Reading Summer Summit? Do you want to tell us the title and a brief description? I know it's about fluency, but give us the title and then the description so that we know a little bit of what we can expect to see at the summit.
Wendy:
So it's called Fluency, The Why, and The How. We address why it's important, how to assess it, and how to provide targeted instruction in a nutshell.
Hanna:
Excellent. I love that. Can you give maybe one... So I gave an example of how you could target prosody, really using a mentor text to show what the author is doing, and then we can start to practice. Is there any little, tiny little nugget that you would just share quickly in one minute may be, of another, maybe when you're talking about automaticity? How you would teach kids what that means?
Jen Yagid:
Okay. So in order for us to teach students how to become automatic, Hanna, like you said, it's so important to teach the kids the why and why we're doing what we're doing because if they don't know the why, then they're not going to be invested and they're just going to be like, "Okay, just another thing that I have to do. Another hoop I have to jump through." So with our fluency grids, and just so everyone knows, fluency grids, so we talk about, and this was actually leading me into, we were just talking about the fluency at the passage level.
Fluency is not just at the passage level and this is another thing that we're going to talk about at the summit. So fluency, sometimes students aren't ready yet to read fluently at the passage level, which means, just like when you assess and you assess that they're not there yet, then you have to back that up. So you might go from the passage level to the sentence level. They still might not be there. You might go from the sentence level to the phrase level, to the word level, or if they need it, even at the sound level.
Hanna:
Yeah.
Jen Yagid:
So when we're talking at that sound and word level, I really think that the fluency grids are a great way to do that and basically they're just exactly what they sound like, a grid that has, I don't know, it could be 15 to 20 boxes with either words or letters, if that's where they're at and to just have the students practice reading words fluently. I always pick, so if you're working on short A with the students, then you would take a fluency grid that has all short A words on it. So Wendy and I have a process that we always do with our students because we always like to put in scaffolds.
I might say, "Okay, so we're going to do a fluency grid today and I will read the first five words." Okay? So I'll say, "I'll read before you and then you copy me, okay?" So they have it done for them. Then I might have us, "Okay, let's try this part together." It's like that gradual release of responsibility. Then ultimately, what I want them to do is to read the words and practice reading them with automaticity within a certain amount of time, but I think that's a great way. Fluency grids are an awesome way to build automaticity with your readers.
Wendy:
There's just one caveat to that, which is we use fluency grids with taught skills, right?
Jen Yagid:
Yes.
Wendy:
So we don't use fluency grids with a skill that a student's never been exposed to.
Hanna:
Yeah. I think that's the important part of the structured literacy piece, right, is that it's sequential? We've got that specific scope and sequence. We teach it. Then we're going to do it right here and right now. We're going to put that little mini lesson we just learned right into use so that it's forefront of our brain, that it's not like we heard it yesterday and we'll get to practicing it, right?
Wendy:
Yeah.
Hanna:
If we were doing a cooking class or whatever automotive class, we wouldn't just hear about it and then go figure it out yourself. I think that's what a lot of leveled readers do is they expect the kid to figure it out when we've only taught a little portion of it. Then they're left to their own devices for all these words and of course they're guessing, of course the only thing they have is...
Jen Yagid:
The only option [inaudible 00:22:15]
Hanna:
Yeah. That's the only option and all they have is if the picture maybe can relate to one of the words. I've said this before in another podcast that as a picture book reviewer, most of the pictures in an authentic text are these beautiful background images, or it's really highlighting maybe the character's facial expression, or we see something happening, but it's maybe referring to a noun, but it's not referring to a lot of the adverbs, adjectives. Maybe the verb might be able to be inferred. Some of that information, we have to break it down, like you said. It might even be still at sound level for brand new sounds and then we can introduce it for words and phrases and sentences. So I think that's a real good nugget to end our podcast today because it needs to be so critically said that this is systematic. This is an important piece. It is one of the big five that we know about that real structured literacy approach. Thank you both so much. I cannot wait to hear the presentation for the summit. Thank you for your time today.
Wendy:
Thank you, Hanna.
Jen Yagid:
Thank you so much for having us.
Wendy:
That's great.
Connect with Jen and Wendy:
Website: https://informedliteracy.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/informedlit/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InformedLit
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCDE4Ut9Y5ZgzNimn40l0rQ
TPT: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Informed-Literacy
Megabook of Fluency by Timothy Rasinski and Melissa Cheeseman Smith
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